The Daniel M. Sachs
Class of 1960
Graduating Scholarship

Dan Sachs, cropped from the group
picture of the Oxford University rugby team

In Memoriam Dan Sachs ’60

Frank Deford ’61
Princeton Alumni Weekly, 10 October 1967

THERE is a
special attribute about the memories held of Dan Sachs. It is not elicited by
any single recollection. The reflections of many of those who loved
and admired him must be taken together, and only then does this extra
response emerge: that each man who knew Dan Sachs found in him the quality
which that friend valued foremost and hoped to be thriving in himself. He had
a rare scope and penetration that made it possible for him to leave intense
impressions upon the most diverse company.

The strong who speak of
Sachs cite first his courage; the ambitious specify his drive; the
intellectual, his love of learning; the tender, his understanding; the philosophical, his vision; the moral, his diligence to
live by his own stem values. He won the respect of each man on his own
grounds; yet always he was constant with himself.

His own search was for the
heroic, and it can be judged that he found that. At the memorial service for
Dan, the Rev. Mr. Milton Yeack said: “Life is not to be measured by
accomplishments alone, but also by commitments.”
Daniel M. Sachs ’60 died of cancer on June 20 at his home in Bethlehem, Pa.,
a few weeks before his twenty-ninth birthday. He left his wife, the former
Joan Lundstrom, a brave young woman whose courage mirrored that of her
husband, and their daughter, Alexandra, who was one year old this September 15. His own
father, an air force colonel, died in a plane crash when Dan was only eight.
”It is best that Dan did not have a son himself,” says a close
friend, “for Alexandra will not have to face the task of growing up to
be her father.”

Her father’s standards were exceeded only by his
goals. Dan Sachs’ life could have been one of greatness. He
prepared himself for that, not in cocky anticipation, but in studied
precaution, so that if the opportunity ever did confront him, he would be
provided for it. Shortly after he left Princeton, as a Rhodes Scholar, he
wrote: ”If we fail to seize the vision now, in the
years of intellectual strife when
character becomes formed, then we can seldom hope to breathe life into the
myth once we take up the tools of the world.”

The possibility of making
any concession to the ordinary forced
him after excellence. “I fear mediocrity more than I fear anything else;” he said. He
came to Princeton with low college board scores, the first ever to enter the
University from Emmaus (Pa.) High School. He was graduated from Princeton a
Rhodes Scholar and a Phi Beta Kappa, with High Honors in French. He also
earned honors in History at Oxford, and was elected to an office that is
equivalent to class president in his college, Worcester. He endured Harvard
Law next, not as a prelude to the Bar, but as an essential part of the
structure of the career he planned in politics.

He never did like the study
of law. It was too dry for his curious mind, one that raced in excited
pursuit after ideas and experience. Sachs was a voracious and eclectic
reader—history, philosophy, poetry, novels—and he pondered everything
he read. He studied constantly. Yet—and
more so in his last years—he also began zealously to scrutinize the people
about him, especially—intentionally—those of different style and alien
temperament. It began as a determined exercise, his own kindergarten for
politics; it ended up bringing him an even more genuine appetence for life.

He probably never was
satisfied that he was able, as he put it, “to become natural and
easy.” He was envious of those with that facility, and showed his admiration
for them—which is perhaps why those of wit and warmth now are determined to
maintain that Sachs had much more humor than he was ever credited with. Dan
himself was convinced that “my phlegmatic, essentially German soul”
was capable of laughing only at his own inability to laugh. “How can
people live just for the moment?” he asked with jealous perplexity after
spending one weekend of a French visit with a tough, scurrilous Algerian
truck driver and his whole ribald family. That question Dan posed in 1960. By
1964 he had answered it sufficiently to become the only elected member of an
impromptu, outlandish social order among Harvard proctors and graduate
students that was titled “The Select Committee of the Whole Group”
and was solemnly devoted to accomplishing
absolutely nothing except an occasional night of intramural bedlam, as
practiced in the guise of fellowship. And he loved it; he was learning to
relax.

From the time he met Joan,
his ways were easier and happier. He was introduced to her one day in the
spring of ’64. “Well,” he told friends later that
evening, “I just met the girl I am going to marry.” (He let her in
on this observation somewhat later.) He courted her with walks, not because
he was cheap or impecunious (though he never had much money), but because he
was peculiar that way—Dan Sachs liked walks. Long, ambling, sauntering,
meandering, striding, happy, serious—well,
old-fashioned walks. They were his parties. He reserved them for his best
girl or for his good friends, as others save a bottle of wine or a newspaper
clipping. With Joan, he walked along the Charles River that spring, and it
was to be the happiest time in their lives.

NORMALLY, despite
the panorama of his successes, Sachs approached each new experience with
trepidation. He was as wary and withdrawn when he came to
Oxford as he had been when he first arrived in Princeton. Ease—much less
confidence—would come only when he felt that he was in command of a
situation. He was determined to play football at Princeton despite his
slight, fragile build simply because he appreciated that the sport was the
one thing he could be immediately proficient in, and that the football
stadium was the one place where a young man could find a touch of
recognition. After he received one of the more serious of the myriad
injuries that he took from football, his faculty advisor asked him
point-blank one day why he played the game when it cost so much suffering.
Sachs answered directly. “But, sir, I must,” was all he said.

He did truly love the game
and sport. He won three letters in both football and lacrosse, and he
remained at Oxford for a third year in order that he might become one of the
few Americans ever to win a Blue, playing rugby against Cambridge. At
Princeton, his many honors included the captaincy of his freshman football
team, All-Ivy selection as a sophomore, winner of the William Winston Roper
Trophy for all-around excellence in athletics, and co-winner of the John
Prentiss Poe Cup for football. Coach Dick Colman feels that Sachs and Royce
Flippin have been the two best running backs to play for Princeton since the
war. Sachs’ ability to accelerate was rated as without parallel.

His only deficiences were,
first, his size, and, second, his failure to accept that first deficiency. He
permitted himself no special consideration; he ran, his coaches say, “too
hard for his body.” Why he played—”I must”—was why, too, he played as he did. Sachs wrote,
after seeing his first bullfight: “Something of the medieval remains in
my soul, I guess. Man against beast, the imminent threat of death, man armed with his skill and
courage—this appeals to my sense of heroism.”

It is not inappropriate
then, despite the promise of his life and his incipient accomplishment in so
many areas, that his only demonstrable public success was logged within the
chalked lines of the playing field—a wispy number 46, the shock
of black hair swept under his helmet, now dashing and hurtling around end.
Yet even that image—preserved now in old game films that have been stopped
and started a hundred times, to see how the left tackle blocked and where the
linebacker moved—was denied the full
exposure it deserved.

What caress of fame Sachs
did have was restricted almost entirely to his sophomore season, a decade ago,
the fall of 1957. That was the All-Ivy year, the only one even relatively
free from injury. It is a conspicuous, but not exaggerated, analogy that
Dan’s football career, like his life, was more of promise than fulfillment.
But the corollary to that is just as legitimate: in each episode of his life
he began tentatively, searching, and ended successfully, mastering. The pattern for great accomplishment in a full
life was clearly established.

THE cancer was
originally detected following his first year at Harvard Law, on July 10, 1964.
It was located behind the left knee, an area which had previously
been operated on because of a hamstring injury. Initially a local operation
was performed. Later, in the spring, summer
and fall of 1966, a further local operation followed by two amputations
eventually took all of his leg, but failed to arrest the malignancy. Dan
married Joan, finished law school, and had the joy of their daughter in the
shadow of time left him. He exercised his profession briefly in a law firm in
Allentown in the intervals of hospitalization during the winter and spring of
1966-67. Near the end, while only the faint hope for
miracle held amidst the pain, he displayed a strength of will, a selfless,
continued interest in those about him, and also, a remarkable facility for
detachment. He could calmly discuss the consequences of his impending death
for his family; he was so concerned about what he considered a rude inability
to remain alert for visitors, that he took to lifting weights on the day
before he died in an effort to recapture some strength. There was massive
dignity evident until he died peacefully on June 20 in the
morning.

Dan approached his death
with neither bitterness nor self-pity. “I am not afraid,” he said.
The emotion he did display was that of angry frustration, a torment that,
simply, he should be denied his chance. “He was, after all,” a
friend says, “pragmatic more than philosophical, and romantic without
being sentimental.” He was an exceptional young man, cast out of
qualities that rest easily in few men of any age, at any time.

In one of his moments of
introspection, shortly after he left Princeton, he wrote: “This is a
difficult time for me. The successes of my Princeton career are behind me and
for the next ten years or so I pass into the shadows of the unknown. I feel
the beginning of obscurity, and it has shaken my confidence. I’ve played
before the crowds too long.” The sorrow is as much for the crowds as for
Dan Sachs that he was deprived of the chance to come before them again, that
his life gave him time for only great commitment and a few bold Saturday
afternoons in the autumns of a decade ago.

To perpetuate his memory a Daniel M. Sachs
Scholarship Trust has been established; for the present it will
provide for the education of his
daughter but its eventual and permanent purpose is to endow distinguished fellowships for graduating seniors who
intend careers in politics or
public service to study and travel abroad. If feasible, a similar
fellowship will allow an Oxford man to study at Princeton. Inquiries
should be directed to Professor Charles C. Gillispie
of the History Department, one
of the constituted advisors to the Trustee.-ED.

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